I've presently set up a cluster of 5 AMD dual-core linux boxes for
my students (at a small college). I've got MPICH running, shared
NIS/NFS home directories etc. After reading the MPICH installation
guide and manual, I can't say I understand how to deploy MPICH for my
students to use. So far as I can tell, there no load balancing or
migration of processes in the library, and so now I'm trying to
figure out what piece of software to add to the cluster to (for
example) prevent the starting of an MPI job when there's already
another job running.
(1) Is openPBS or gridengine the appropriate tool to use for a multi-
user system where mpich is available? Are there better scheduling
options?
(1.5) Can mortals install and configure Gridengine? Thus far it
seems too wonderful for me to understand.
(2) Also, if my cluster is made up of a mix of single and dual
processor machines, what's the proper way to tell mpd about that
topology?
(3) Its likely that in the future I'll have part-time access to
another cluster of dual-boot (XP/linux) machines. The machines will
default to booting to Linux, but will occasionally (5-20 hours a
week) be used as windows workstations by a console user (when a user
is finished, they'll restart the machine and it will boot back to
linux). If cluster nodes are available in this sort of unpredictable
and intermittent way, can they be used as compute nodes in some
fashion? Wil gridengine/PBS /??? take care of this sort of process
migration?
bet regards,
Nathan
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Nathan Moore
Physics
Winona State University
AIM:nmoorewsu